I really want things to work out between us. I know that my relationships with your siblings have ended abruptly (see: Buzz & Wave), but I’m extremely loyal to your family (see: Search, Gmail, and Maps) and want to invest the time to make this happen. Your family is the Kennedys of the internet, and you were crafted by engineering Gods, which makes you irresistible to date. But this is a two-way street, and I’ll need you to make some sacrifices too.

First, I don’t want to move too fast. It’s not that I’m a prude; it’s just that I’m in a few other long-term relationships and I can’t commit all my time to you. I know you have friends, photos, streams, statuses, group video hangouts (see: awesome), and circles (who doesn’t like curves?), but it’s overwhelming and disingenuous to pretend that we’ve been together since the spring of 2004. We can’t just fabricate our past by circling up 700 million friends and billions of photos. Relationships take time. I know you hate Facebook, but she and I took gradual steps to improve our relationship over the past 7 years. We may have been poking early on, but we weren’t emoting our “I love you” statuses publicly until our 3rd anniversary.

If I marry you, Google+, I’ll also be cheating on Gmail. And I don’t want to do that, I love Gmail. Gmail is my journal, my confidant, my best friend. And like Facebook, Gmail will surprise me with awesome new gifts like Chat or Talk or Labs. These presents are easy to embrace because they are given gradually and not desperately thrown at me all at once.

You know what? I’m realizing that I want to take the next step with Gmail, not you, Google+. All of my circles are already on Gmail. I communicate with them incessantly. Add the group video and the stream to Gmail, and let’s start hanging out.

RD – Google’s only option was to be very aggressive with their social plan. I think it’s clear that they didn’t have a simple revolutionary idea that would wow everyone, so they went the other route and made incremental improvements on other services’ products. I think that’s perfectly valid. And it will have time to innovate and engage once it builds up a user base and there is some engagement in the system.

Aaron

Haha love it. I have zero interest right now in creating a new social profile – Facebook already is driving me nuts.

Twitter FTW!

Rishi Khullar

I’m sure you follow a bunch of awesome writers / thinkers / entrepreneurs on Twitter. Do you also follow them on Facebook? Probably not. You will on Google + though…

Kartik

I completely agree – they’re trying too hard to replace established services, rather than just incorporating the good ideas into the stable foundation they’ve got…

SG

+1

ernesto

Dear Rick,Fair and valid points and it will be interesting to see how gmail plays nicely in the sandbox. I think you’ve missed a point though: There are people out there whose hesitation “is in creating an online, very public, self-brand. We [keep] our brands guarded. Publicly displaying your thoughts can certainly be daunting and risky for an individual – especially if done recklessly, but creating your social brand is increasingly becoming more relevant.”It’s hard to believe that there isn’t value in something like circles vs. an alternative solution…like, say, dropping a letter from one’s surname to avoid being found publicly.And fyi, you’re the author of above quote. You asked my thoughts? there you have them. Give it a try and if it’s really not useful, don’t use it. No one’s asking anything differently.Love,ernesto (facebook.com/ernestosoriano, twitter.com/ernesto, gplus.to/ernesto)